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Quotes by Activist
"Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right."
19
"In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education."
19
"The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny."
19
"A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent."
19
"I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet."
19
"Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive."
19
"A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive."
19
"If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?"
19
"Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy."
19
"Socialism is nothing more nor less than the social, political and ideological system which breaks the fetters upon economic growth created under capitalism and opens the way to a new period of economic and social expansion on a much larger scale."
19
"I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers."
19
"Then there is the worst part of Christianity, which is awful: power, corruption, manipulation... But then again, these feature are ever present in any organization."
19
"I could get into bed with James Bond, then take my false leg off and it would really be a gun."
19
"So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations."
19
"Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!"
18
"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."
18
"Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind."
18
"Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer."
18
"If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health."
18
"The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism."
18
"The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters."
18
"Reigning doctrines are often called a "double standard".The term is misleading.It is more accurate to describe them as a single standard,clear and unmistakable,the standard that Adam Smith called the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: ...All for ourselves,and nothing for other people." Much has changed since his day,but the vile maxim flourishes."
18
"The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin."
18
"There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It's just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can't even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That's just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it."
18
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum-even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
18
"Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't."
18
"Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as deathsquads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem."
18
"The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary."
18
"The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' states is replete with distortions and often outright lies."
18
"It is almost impossible to imagine that any one could be so insensible to the high morality of Mr. Mill's character as to suggest to him any course of conduct that was not entirely upright and consistent."
18
"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism."
18
"Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce."
18
"Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night."
18
"I was never aware of any other option but to question everything."
18
"Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."
18
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